Version 7.3 comes with new additions to expand the ways to build and showcase your popular posts lists!

Experimental Elementor Support

Elementor is, without question, one of the most popular -if not the most popular- WordPress page builders out there. Its unmatched drag-and-drop interface offers flexibility in design, allowing users to build websites without coding knowledge, making it a solid alternative to the WordPress Block Editor (a.k.a. Gutenberg.)

Starting version 7.3.0, WordPress Popular Posts now includes a brand new widget for Elementor, making it easier for you to add a popular posts list anywhere while building pages with Elementor.

The experience using this widget will be mostly the same as the old classic WordPress Popular Posts widget (removed from the plugin since version 7.0) and the WordPress Popular Posts block so if you have used any of those before everything should feel pretty familiar to you.

Keep in mind that this is the first version of the widget so changes are to be expected. If you have comments / questions about it please feel free to leave a comment below or in the support forum.

New wpp_get_ids() function

One very common question users have asked in the support forum is how to get a list of popular posts IDs so they can, for example, use that data to build a fully custom popular posts list / slider / whatever. The solution so far was to build a custom function to pull these IDs from the database but often this information got buried down in the forum as time went on.

Version 7.3.0 introduces the wpp_get_ids() function to provide an official, documented way to get these IDs from the database. Better late than never, eh?

Admin Section Usability Improvements

This release also gives some love to the admin section of the plugin, specifically the Stats section and the Tools section. Functionality-wise, it’s the same, except it should now be easier to navigate the section for individuals with disabilities and/or those who prefer/rely on keyboard-based navigation.

Additionally, some visual elements have been changed to improve accessibility, for example, things that behave like buttons/tabs/etc. now look and act like such, active/hover states, etc.

“Empty cache” and “Clear all data” Buttons Removed

This one has been long overdue. When these buttons were first added to the Tools section the original intent was to provide more advanced users (eg. fellow developers) a way to quickly reset some/all of the data stored by WordPress Popular Posts on the site’s database. While this worked flawlessly, less-aware / curious users frequently wiped out their popular posts data without making a proper backup first.

Because of that, a confirmation modal was added later on, and while it surely helped reduce the amount of accidental popular posts data deletions some users still managed to do it anyways.

Now, to make absolutely sure that no popular posts data is deleted by accident, these buttons have been removed from the Tools page completely.

If you want/need to wipe out your popular posts data for some reason you’ll need to access your site’s database, find the _popularpostsdata table (all-time data) and the _popularpostssummary table (time-ranged data), and delete their data manually via TRUNCATE TABLE or similar.

Miscellaneous

• There was a PHP 8.4 deprecation notice reported by ispreview that’s been fixed.
• A minor modernization of the JavaScript code has been made to facilitate future maintenance, and in some cases this resulted in smaller .js files too which is always a plus.
• Minimum required PHP version is now 7.3.

Minor Updates & Hotfixes

7.3.1

Version 7.3.1, released on April 6, 2025, is a small release that patches up two issues:

• The [wpp] shortcode and the wpp_get_mostpopular() template tag started adding an <ul class=”wpp-list”> wrapper to the popular post list whenever the parameters wpp_start and wpp_end were empty after the 7.3.0 release. Thanks ispreview for reporting this regression!
• Users with the Author role were no longer able to see the popular posts list on the Stats screen. Thanks waheed61 for the heads-up!